Mood-Based Radio for the Frat Party Set: To Chill or To Rage?

Ah, the eternal question facing many a college student: to rage or to chill? To party or not to party? To shotgun cans of Natty Light or fire up the old N64 and play a few post-ironic rounds of Mario Kart? Those are the questions haunting some young minds of today.

RageChill (free), a streaming radio app for iOS and web, will not make those gut-wrenching decisions any easier. It will, however, ensure you’ll have the perfect soundtrack for any activity on the above spectrum\ once you have set your course for Rage, Chill, or somewhere in between.

This app offers a refreshingly simple set of controls. You get play and skip buttons, a volume knob, and a big slider with “Rage” on one end and “Chill” on the other — that’s it. That last control affects the party- or chillout-worthiness of the music you’ll hear, as determined by the app’s creators.

It’s never explicitly stated, but it’s pretty clear who this app is geared towards: the 18- to 25-year-old, EDM- and country music-loving, keg-party-throwing male, found on a college campus near you. You might know him simply as “bro.”

The Rage end of the spectrum is populated by wobble-heavy club tracks. “Full rage is all dubstep,” tweeted the RageChill Twitter account recently.

Conversely, the Chill side houses everything from southern rock stalwarts The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, to mellowed out indie rock acts like Band of Horses and Local Natives — everything a raging or chilling bro could ask for.

Much of the music, especially on the “rage” side, isn’t up my personal alley, but this app’s straightforward appeal is immediately clear. Just turn it on, tell it whether you’d like to relax or go H.A.M., and let it do the rest. If RageChill offered a way to steer the musical genres, perhaps by allowing you to enter the names a few artists to guide the playlist, I’d probably be all over it.

What about you? Is this app worth the download or web browser visit? If you regularly use “rage” as a verb meaning “to party;” if you can name more than one track by Avicii; or if you’ve ever referred to Dave Matthews simply as “Dave,” you’re probably going to find a lot to love in RageChill. It’s free, there are no commercials, and it couldn’t be simpler to use, even after shotgunning a few brewskis.